Fighting the attacks on the culture of life by the unwashed masses of the neopagan culture of death. The intrinsic human dignity and rights of personhood of every human being must be protected against further capricious acts of judicial fiat.

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

The Daily Utah Chronicle Advances Anti-Catholic Bigotry

From the 2003 Archives of NEW RIGHT PUBLICATIONS' Realm Of Misanthropy:

In an exceedingly crude and vulgar anti-Catholic screed, Craig Froehlich launched an intensely vitriolic and incoherent attack on his former church following a week of celebration in thanksgiving for the lives and apostolates of two of the greatest citizens of the 20th century.

Unlike the first response to this uncharitable mischaracterization of the Catholic faith, I am a "non-revisionist" Catholic: A Catholic who thinks the faith is true. (Period!) The world doesn't need another half-hearted, fearful, and conciliatory profession of the Catholic faith. The truth of the faith needs to be declared boldly and uncompromisingly with orthodoxy because the faith resonates at every level of the human senses and intellect: The faith is liberating, illuminating, ecstatically beautiful, challenging, and invigorating.

Mr. Froehlich seems angry that the Church lives simultaneously in the world and in the galleries of the Vatican museum. He condemns the Church for changing the process of evaluating the presence of heroic virtue in a holy life while he condemns the Church for not changing her doctrines on the holy priesthood and God's gift of human sexuality. Imagine that! The Church doesn't alter the essential and unchanging truths of the doctrines of salvation, but Heaven forefend if she considers alterations to the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Vatican congregations.

It is with this charge that we touch the surface of his anger. There is no greater heresy in the modern liberal mind than to ignore, marginalize, and relegate to irrelevance the power and influence of big governments and mammoth bureaucracies. This is precisely what Mother Teresa did in her ministry to the poorest of the poor.

She didn't love, care, feed, and house the homeless through a welfare state scheme of income redistribution. She didn't substitute the poverty of destitution and deprivation with a poverty of materialism and overabundance -- the sort of poverty that reduces the dignity of the human person to a jumble of disordered passions and values the individual insofar as they contribute to the net worth of a nation.

In caring for the poor of Calcutta, Mother Teresa did none of the things that the secularists advocate to instill self-esteem and empowerment in the victim class. Her life was an authentic witness to the radical, self-emptying message of the Gospel. Her mission to see Jesus in the faces of everyone she met was her small way to imitate the agape love that He showed us in His passion and death at Golgotha. This kind of love is too deep, too strong, and too unselfish -- and it offends the pride of the modern world.

If Mr. Froehlich spent as much time learning about and forming his faith as he did reading the modernist and rationalist propaganda of unabashed secular materialists, then his remarks could possibly have had a shred of intellectual honesty and charity. Perhaps, he might not have felt compelled to issue forth from his venomous quill the cruel and profane attacks on this Blessed Servant of God, Mother Teresa of Calcutta.